I think it just comes down to a money making tactic of making the movie/show available to the widest audience available to increase revenue. In my view it is sad, and basically creates more dull and less interesting cinema. I've been wanting a good HALO movie since the game was released... but I doubt I'll ever get it.
It seems to me that all these large corporations are more concerned with following ESG than with their own customers. What happens if you don’t follow “the message” we saw with Tesla some months ago.
Another way of looking at it is that they alienated half their audience in only three movies. They killed one of the most well known franchises for peanuts.
$1 billion in box office is still huge; I wouldn't call it "peanuts". And the box office of the original three films was $776 million, $538 million, and $475 million, so that was quite similar.
Keep in mind that that is pre-inflation. Episode 4 made 1.3 billion adjusted for inflation, with a far smaller moviegoing audience.
The new films are just milking every ounce of life out of the franchise. The money they're making is indeed peanuts to what a talented crew could have made.
My point was just that the pattern (subsequent films had significantly lower box offices) was the same. Comparing box offices from several decades ago is hard not so much due to inflation but because there are so many alternatives to watch something today, and the time from theatre to "you can watch it at home" is much much shorter than it used to be. You really need to compare all income sources, but those often aren't published.
At any rate, the message I originally replied to was "do these movies make money though?", and the answer to that is "absolutely yes!" I don't really have an opinion on Star Wars as I didn't care all that much even for the older films. They probably could have been better (and made more money!), but it's the difference between "making a fuckton of money" vs. "making a shitton of money", so to speak. You don't need to make "the best" to actually make money; "good enough" is, well, good enough.
